Better Turns In 1 Day - How To Corner A Mountain Bike : Bermed Corners

hey what's up guys today we're going to teach you how to corner [Music] so we've already done a corning part 1 video which has had a corner on flat turns and switchbacks like when you have your outside foot down today we're going to tackle berms and higher g-force corners when you have your feet level and we're going to talk about how to enter the corner how to lean into it where to look where your body position should be and the goal today is to help you carry more speed feel more confident and have more grip just after a day of practicing okay so we got april out here and today we're gonna try to get you ripping through a turn but first before we do that let's talk about the most common mistakes i see really briefly there's four kind of key mistakes i see people make a lot if it looks like you stick around we'll show you how to address them and the reasons why they kind of affect your cornering those four mistakes are number one coming in too fast into the turn i see that one a lot where people are coming and going really quick and then last second they have to kind of hit the brakes in the corner i'll tell you why that's a big deal and how braking before can really help your cornering the second mistake i see people make is they're not really sure where to look through the turn they have good intention they come into the corner and then they kind of get lost on where to be looking and a lot of times that'll make you flow over the top of the berm so that's the one i see a lot of people make as well mistake number three is body position coming into the turn should you be standing should you be seated should be over the front of the bike the middle or the back we'll talk about that as well and then number four that i see is people coming into the corner they're doing everything right and then mid turn they'll push their bike out in front of them a lot of times people think that they're like pumping or something but i'll tell you why that affects your cornering and how we can clean that up and get you going faster with all that being said let's go ahead and have april start working on the corners back here we're gonna have her do it with no coaching first and then we can kind of talk about what she's doing right what she can improve and how to get you going faster all right so april's up at the top about to hit these corners for the first time but i just wanted to be fair and tell you guys she has a pretty good base of cornering already from her motocross background so she looks good on this first one don't be surprised and then we'll kind of work on dialing it in and we'll make sure to explain the reasons why we're doing everything that we're doing ready yeah all right [Applause] well how'd that feel is that okay sweet the only thing i really saw right off the bat was just your breaking so we can work on that later how about first we'll kind of start back at the basics and we'll talk about riding position for people and then we'll work on how to enter the corner where to break where to let off and where to look all right well let's go down and we'll just kind of do a little overview okay okay so when we're talking about like a berm corner or high g-force turn what we're talking about is anytime that your bike experiences g-force so you're going through a corner and you kind of feel the suspension load the reason that when we're in that situation we want to have our feet level is because when you have one foot down on a flat corner you can get away with putting one foot down but if you get g-force into that it'll actually push your bike and make it want to stand up so that's why on higher g-force corners or like high-speed berms we'll do feet level and that's kind of the riding position and theory behind that is feet level and then i'll show you guys where you should be on the bike coming into the corner now that we kind of established that you're going to want to have your feet level the next thing that we'll talk about is whether you should be standing or if you're going to be seated i always prefer to be standing the reason being that when you're seated if there's any holes in the berm then as you're seated the bike's going to transfer that energy into your body and it'll kind of make you bounce as you're going through the corner that makes your grip not as consistent whereas if you're standing or hovering above the seat then essentially the bike can move and it's not affecting your body weight and so that's why i like to always be standing i think you should be in a good like nice neutral riding position which is what we've talked about in some other videos so go ahead and hop in like a nice neutral riding position as she's coming into the corner i see a lot of people not sure where to be i'll see some people come into the corner like that i'll see some people come into the corner in front and it's kind of like a guessing game you want to be kind of as centered as possible and you want to think about it so that when your bike is experiencing the g-force in the turn both the front and rear shock are kind of moving equally the reason being for that is if your bike is moving equally front and rear your head angle and your wheelbase and all of the geometry on your bike maintains the same arc and so you'll have a consistent turn through the corner i'll kind of show you guys what that looks like with april so right now if she's in this position if you were to bounce so bounce a couple times you kind of can see both the front and rear shock moving equally now go further back and now like compress like you're hitting g so now you can see the rear shock just moving and what that'll do is as you come into the corner if you're too far back it'll compress the rear shock and it'll make your bike change the angle through the turn and you'll kind of have to steer to adjust what we want is you to brake come into the corner lean and just have a nice edge like you're almost skiing or snowboarding or something april had a really good question about pumping in a turn and like where do you pump and how do you pump through a turn for me like when i'm riding a pump track and i'm on a hardtail i'll really pump a corner super hard because i'm trying to get as much speed out of it as possible and with a hardtail the rear suspension isn't compressing and like changing the angle of it but on my full suspension bike i'll kind of sacrifice a little bit of the pump that i can get by staying more centered on the bike because i don't want it to kind of do the big movement i want to stay as centered as i can and if there's a pocket like when your suspension starts to compress that's where you'll get the pump so as your suspension compresses if you just push into that pocket harder and put more weight into it it'll kind of squirt your bike forward but it's a little bit different technique out here today especially on like bigger berms and 180s i don't really like to get off the back of the bike and pump because for me the a little bit of extra speed isn't worth the change in the angle and it kind of messes me up for the turn so i don't know if that makes sense like okay so that's kind of how i think about pumping in a turn the point in the turn where you should be pumping is when your suspension is compressing and you'll feel that if you can just put more weight into it right there you'll kind of get a little bit of boost okay when i'm cornering on a downhill a lot of times it helps so much to have your seat down so if you have a dropper seat post that helps a lot and if you're someone who's been struggling uh through corners and not being able to get the bike leaned enough having your seat dropped a few inches can help a ton so when we're doing all this stuff our seat's going to be down that way the bike can kind of move underneath us without it the seat getting in the way now that we went over kind of the basics of body position and everything let's go ahead take it back to the trail and we'll talk about entrance and where we're going to be looking through the corner and how to rip it [Music] now we're going to talk about where to break going into a corner we touched on this a lot more in depth in the breaking video so check that out if you want to learn more about that but really briefly let's touch on it and anytime you're going into a corner i like to try to get all my breaking done you can barely see it there's a little leaf right there i like to try to get all my breaking done before the turn starts to turn so on this turn in particular april's gonna have this really long straight away leading into it so she'll get a ton of speed coming through here kind of set up a little start breaking point just as a guide but she's gonna break break break break coming through here and then her breaking should be finished right as she gets to the point where the turn really starts to curve and that will be where you want to let off your breaks as much as you can how do i know when to start breaking for each corner because you have it set it makes sense to always have that end point where it starts to turn uh for braking but will it always be this much distance of when i start braking it will change a lot between riders and into different turns and depending on the straightaway so it's really hard for me to give you like a this is how you do it and it's always 10 feet or 15 feet or whatever but what i would say is just practice and this is where sessioning comes in handy you'll really start to learn like how effective you are at breaking and on a day even like a dry day we might have to start breaking here and if it's tacky you'll break there but we just want to get controlled speed by the time the corner starts to turn okay so i want to be off the brakes by then yeah off the brakes and if you can't for some reason if you go into the corner and you can't do no brakes all the way around i really like to recommend lightly using the rear brake um because that way it won't upset your geometry quite as bad and it won't shift your weight forward quite as bad and you'll kind of maintain more front tire traction okay so all your braking done both brakes and a straight line if you can let off to go around the corner and if you need to just lightly drag the rear brake okay cool um where should i be at in the corner like um line selection that is a good question about line choice and for the most part on most turns you want to try to be as wide as you can coming into the corner so that way it'll smooth out the arc around the turn the further inside you are the more of an abrupt turn you'll have and the further outside you are the smoother it'll be so on this corner what i would do is i would come in like this to the right of this little banana leaf and get over set up let off the brakes and corner and then just maintain a constant arc all the way through the corner if you can here is an example of my line choice through these turns as i come into the first turn i begin breaking evenly with both the front and rear brake and i set up as wide as possible to allow for the smoothest arc through the corner here you can see i'm just starting to lean my bike in preparation for the corner and i'm still on both brakes just a moment later as my bike enters the curve of the turn i let go of both brakes to allow for the most traction possible and to reduce the chance of my body weight shifting on the bike as i go around the turn i'm not touching either break and i'm looking down the trail in preparation of setting up wide on the next turn where do you look in the corner um how about just kind of show you a good one and a bad one okay that was one where i kind of was looking at the apex the whole time and that pushed me wide as i exited the turn on this one i'm going to look through the turn kind of back down the center of the trail where i'm planning on going or where i want to go and it'll kind of snap me around and get me to carry more speed it's on that one i tried to like come into the corner and kind of look out down the trail and that really helped me kind of set up and not only set up and get out of the corner faster but it helped me plan better that's why it's really key to look through the turn because not only does it help you turn the one that you're on but it helps you kind of read the terrain in the next section of trail so that's why it's so key a lot of times if you fixate on blowing the berm or if there's like a little tree root or something at the end of the corner that you're looking at you'll pretty much always hit it so just try to look where you want to go look for success don't try to look for failure and it'll help a lot [Music] that was super fast on the second one try just kind of staying a little bit more centered on the bike both sideways and and front to back [Applause] yeah sweet that one looked way better it felt faster in that first one yeah you said i was leaning too far back a little bit in the first one and then i kind of focused on going a little bit more forward which is more neutral actually it feels more forward for me but that's it felt the speed that's cool you felt it a lot better yeah yeah it'll be nice that's like when your bike compresses equally and not rear first so being a little bit more forward it'll help a lot good job you're getting better and better but i saw that you started to get in kind of the old habit and made us realize that we weren't like touching base on a really important part when i watch you start the corner you kind of swing your hips into the turn to get the bike to lean as she's entering the turn she is swinging her hips to the inside of the bike and the inside of the corner to initiate her lean this is similar to hanging off the bike like a moto gp racer would what this does is it causes a slight delay between the moment she points her hips into the turn and when the bike actually follows and sets its lean angle usually on a bicycle since the bike has such little mass compared to you it is easier to make fine tune adjustments in your turn angle if you keep your weight centered or slightly outside of the bike's center line and then you can guide the bike with your arms in this example you can see that i like to lean the bike more than my body when going through a turn doing this keeps more of my weight over the cornering knobs for better grip and it allows me to make those fine-tune adjustments to my bike's lean angle by simply guiding the inside hand down or by pushing on the outside foot or hand to stand the bike up the more aggressive the g-force in a turn the closer you will be to a 50-50 split but i like to avoid having more weight to the inside than the outside 99 of the time what i like to do instead is i'll kind of have 85 90 percent of the weight in my feet and then i'll lightly push down on the inside handlebar um to get the bike to start leaning so i'll kind of like push down on the inside handlebar as i start to look instead of like having a moment where the bike falls you want it to kind of be guided into that rail so yeah like what i'm saying to push your inside hand down i'm not saying that like with all your force you just push down it's really like i said most the weight is in your feet and right as you start to get in the turn i just do a light lean with my head kind of like the wall ride video but not as exaggerated so just a light lean at the head kind of inside which will start initiating the turn and then i just lightly push down on my inside handlebar and that'll kind of get me to carve instead of like april right now is initiating the turn by putting her hips into the center of the turn it kind of creates a moment where you go in and then your bike follows and you want it to be like as consistent as possible so okay yeah so try that i'll try all right you're doing good though yeah that looks a lot better yeah does it feel weird uh i mean and maybe it feels exaggerated in my head but i just kind of pretend to lean yeah no that looked a lot better it didn't have that kind of moment where you put your hips in and then it fell let's try it a couple more times and see if it feels good okay yo that was so good that one was good thanks did you feel that yeah yeah felt faster that was sick both corners yeah you look smoother too that's the biggest thing is like pushing the inside bar down instead of leaning your hips in you're so much smoother as you went around the corner and like you didn't have any weird moments of like weight transfer yeah it makes it almost feel slower though because it's smoother yeah totally like you had way more control and sometimes that makes it feel slower but if we were racing you would have been faster on that so sweet yeah that's cool thank you yeah what did you take away from today with all i mean we talked about a lot of stuff so it's really hard because there's so many things to think about but what were kind of the key takeaways that helped you the most for me the thing that helped the most was the fact that i was moving my bi my hips over in the corner and what helped me the most was staying neutral where i thought i was staying neutral like neutral as in like forward back on the bike yes and side side to side side to side completely neutral yeah and then to like focus more on a lean so bike and body lean and not just body i feel like you got a lot faster which was sick and that was kind of the goal um and aside from getting faster the other goal is like getting as much grip as possible and so by her being more neutral on the bike instead of being off the back into the inside it really helps kind of plant that contact patch of the tire into the ground and so i definitely felt more front tire grip yeah you had more weight in your arms yeah that's cool so yeah um a lot of people too she was kind of curious she's like well i feel like i'm getting more load in my front tire is that bad and it's weird but on a bike like the more weight you put on your front tire leaning forward will make it less likely to wash out and moving back you'll have more of a chance of the front tire washing out okay so yeah you did really good thank you thank you guys so much for watching i hope this was helpful i'm sure there's a few things we missed so if we missed anything throw in the comments and we'll try to get to it as soon as we can um these ones are like pretty tough because there's so many little things to do but we're trying our best hopefully it was fun and yeah if you could click like that really helps us out a lot and uh subscribe if you didn't already that'd be sweet so yeah thank you guys yeah thank you all right we'll talk to you next time oh and we're gonna do part three of hill cornering eventually so we'll do uphill switchbacks and stuff we've been getting a lot of requests for that so yeah all right all right thanks guys [Music] oh my god oh

Channel: Kyle & April - Ride MTB

Views: 369,977

Keywords: mountain biking, kyle warner, ridemtb.com, ridemtb, ride mtb, ride mtb podcast, ride mtb coaching, how to mountain bike, april zastrow, how to corner, how to corner 2, how to ride a berm, berms and corners, how to corner on a mountain bike, How to turn on a mountain bike, how to corner a bike, turning a mountain bike

Id: xPX28s0Cf3s

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020